Trump Runs Against Both Parties He’s not a nuclear madman—and he’s not back inside the GOP tent either. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-runs-against-both-parties-1470783690
Donald Trump cleaned up one of his messes, endorsing the re-election of fellow Republicans Paul Ryan, Kelly Ayotte and John McCain. On Monday, he laid out a tax plan that GOPers are genetically predisposed to embrace.
This assures us that Mr. Trump is not crazy in any clinical sense—incapable of changing his approach and adapting to feedback from the environment.
It only semi-assures us on another question. At least part of Mr. Trump is serious about being president—or, anyway, about mounting a campaign that won’t rebound disastrously on the GOP.
Those who marinate in the hyperbole of the moment found Mr. Trump’s bickering with the parents of a slain American soldier of a different order of personal dysfunction, recklessness and political tone-deafness than his threats against Jeff Bezos, his attack on Judge Curiel, his fake buddy act with Putin, etc.
In fact, the back and forth with the Khans was distressingly normal compared with these other episodes. The Khans launched an unquestionably partisan attack (which does not mean it lacked substantive validity) in the most partisan of venues, a Democratic convention.
For once the personal and political were united in one of the Donald’s miscarriages. He may have been motivated by a personal slight but he wasn’t politicizing the nonpolitical for personal or business reasons.
Mr. Trump is still an outside chance to win the presidency. Those commentators who spend all their effort pronouncing him unacceptable—and consigning to reputational hell any who quibble—are letting down their fans. For voters the problem is a multidimensional one.
If Mr. Trump isn’t crazy, unstable or irrational, then he’s merely unpresentable. A Hillary presidency may be preferable if Mrs. Clinton’s only path to presidential achievement is through a Republican Congress. But a possible outcome is all the levers landing in the hands of Democrats who believe nothing is wrong with America that more regulation and redistribution can’t fix. Read the Washington Post’s chilling account of how her campaign gestated Mrs. Clinton’s “detailed and complicated economic policy agenda.” Try not to think of Ira Magaziner’s health-care task force in 1993.
He tells an excitable part of the electorate what it wants to hear, on guns, trade and immigration. When you tell the public untruths, in Mr. Trump’s understanding of business, that’s marketing.
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